End of the Beginning

by Harry Turtledove

  To Fuchida, that had only one possible answer. “We go for the American carriers,” he declared over the all-planes circuit. “Without carrier decks to land on, airplanes here are useless. If we sink the enemy’s carriers, he cannot possibly invade Hawaii. Press on!”

  The Americans should have been thinking along the same lines: so it seemed to him, anyway. But, taking advantage of their numbers, they sent some of their fighters against the Japanese strike force. Even before Fuchida called orders, some of the Zeros shot ahead to defend the precious torpedo planes and dive bombers.

  They’re coming very fast, Fuchida thought. The Americans had been flying higher than the Japanese. Part of that speed came from losing altitude—but only part. Alarm tingled through him. The enemy had something new. Wildcats couldn’t have performed like this. Neither could Zeros.

  Fuchida’s B5N2 had a pair of forward-firing machine guns, plus another pair in the rear cockpit controlled by the radioman. “Be ready, Mizuki,” Fuchida called through the intercom.

  “What else am I going to be, sir?” the first flying petty officer replied. They’d been together a long time. Mizuki could get away with backtalk that would have sent a lot of ratings to the brig.

  Fuchida didn’t answer. Some of the enemy fighters ahead, he saw, were Wildcats, but they weren’t the ones attacking the Japanese. The Americans knew Wildcats couldn’t equal Zeros. They thought these new machines could.

  And they might have been right. A Zero tumbled toward the Pacific, trailing smoke. Another simply exploded in midair. That pilot, at least, probably never knew what hit him. Fuchida waited to see enemy fighters going down, too. He finally spotted one, but only after several Japanese planes were lost.

  The melee with the Zeros that had gone out ahead of the main force didn’t last long. The Americans in the new fighters knew the planes that could hurt their ships were more important. They bored in on the Nakajimas and Aichis.

  When Fuchida tried to get one of the Americans in his sights, he had trouble holding it there—it was that fast. He fired a quick burst, then threw the B5N2 sharply to the left. The new fighter zoomed by, close enough to give him a good look at the pilot. The plane bore a family resemblance to an oversized Wildcat, but had been refined in almost every way possible. How powerful was the engine that drove it? Strong enough to leave Zeros in the dust, plainly. That was not good news.

  Mizuki fired a burst, too. His snarls came through the intercom, so he hadn’t hit anything, either. Maybe he’d made the American pull away. That would be something, anyhow.

  Not all the beefy new American fighters were turning away. Compared to them, the Aichis and Nakajimas the Japanese strike-force pilots flew might have been nailed in place. Dive bombers and torpedo planes fell out of the sky one after another. A few pilots cried out over the radio as they went down. More didn’t have the chance.

  Then, like a summer lightning storm, the Americans were gone. The rest of the Japanese no doubt as horrified and dismayed as Fuchida, they flew on. What waited for them when they found the enemy fleet?

  DON’T DOGFIGHT THE JAPS. Use your speed. Use your firepower. People had been telling Joe Crosetti that from the minute he started training. He’d believed it, too, but only in the way he believed in the Pythagorean theorem: it was one more thing he’d learned in school.

  The minute he saw Zeros maneuvering, he suddenly understood why everybody said the same thing about them. The Japs turned tighter than anything he’d flown probably since graduating from Yellow Perils. Get into a dogfight with them and they’d turn inside you and shoot your ass off.

  Diving past them, raking them with your machine guns, standing on the Hellcat’s tail to climb again for another dive—that looked like a better plan. Joe’s element leader was as green as he was, but he also remembered the lessons. They zoomed past the Zeros, guns blazing, and then went after the Japanese dive bombers and torpedo planes—Vals and Kates in the reporting code they’d learned. Zeros were supposed to be Zekes, but most pilots called them Zeros anyway.

  Back in school, some people couldn’t remember what the big deal about the square of the hypotenuse was. Sure as hell, some of the Navy pilots here couldn’t remember not to get into a turning contest with the fighters with meatballs on their wings. Some of them paid for it, too. “I’m going down!” somebody wailed. Somebody else shouted for his mother, but Mommy couldn’t help him now.

  As Joe made for a Kate, the plane with the torpedo under its belly opened up on him. Tracers zipped past the cockpit. He swung slightly to the left, expecting the Kate to turn to the right. But the pilot—a slightly horse-faced fellow with a mustache—pulled his plane to the left instead. That caught Joe by surprise and left him without a good shot at the Kate.

  There was a flight of Vals. The dive bombers seemed to waddle through the air. Their fixed landing gear made them look like antiques. They’d done a hell of a lot of damage to Allied ships, though.

  Joe’s element leader bored in on them. He shot one down almost at once. They were built tougher than Zeros, but a few rounds through the engine would do the trick. Joe got one in his sights. The other thing they’d said in school was, Get in close. He did. The Val almost filled his sights before he thumbed the firing button on the stick.

  Flames shot from the machine guns on his wings. Recoil made the Hellcat seem to stagger in the air. Joe whooped when he saw chunks of sheet metal fly off the Val. Trailing smoke, the plane spun down toward the ocean more than two miles below. “Got him!” Joe yelled. “Fucking nailed him!”

  A moment later, a Jap in another Val almost nailed him. He’d forgotten Vals and Kates carried rear gunners. All his combat training had been fighter against fighter. The assumption was that if he could handle that, he could handle anything. And so he could—if he didn’t do something idiotic. He dove to get away from the gunner.

  He tried to count how many Japanese planes went down. He couldn’t. Too much was happening too fast. But the Hellcats knocked down a good many. He was sure of that. He was swinging around for another go at the Kates when the squadron leader summoned the American fighters back to the Dauntlesses and Avengers they were shepherding.

  “This is just act one, boys,” the officer said. “We’ve got carriers to catch. That’s the blowoff.”

  He was right, and Joe knew it. All the same, he hated to break away.

  SABURO SHINDO WAS CALM to the point of being boring. He knew as much. He even cultivated the image. It made him all the more impressive on the rare occasions when he lost his temper—or seemed to for effect.

  Now, though, he felt shaken to the core. He’d just seen his Zeros—planes that had dominated every foe they faced—hammered as if they were so many Russian biplanes. He hadn’t thought it was possible, but these new American fighters could outrun, outdive, and outclimb his beloved aircraft by margins embarrassingly large. How had the Yankees done it? That there were such swarms of the new enemy planes only made things worse.

  The American pilots were raw. He saw that right away. He was able to take advantage of it almost at once, getting on an enemy plane’s tail and sending a burst of machine-gun fire into it. But he couldn’t stay on its tail for long, because it ran away from him with effortless ease. And the machine-gun rounds didn’t knock it down or set it on fire. Wildcats had been able to take a lot of damage—and needed to. By all appearances, this new and bigger fighter was tougher yet.

  He used his 20mm cannon against the next American he fought. They did the trick—the enemy plane spiraled down toward the sea. But they were slow-firing and didn’t have a lot of ammunition. If he ran dry with them, he was in trouble.

  And he could be in trouble even if he didn’t. A bullet slammed into his right wing—fortunately, out near the tip, past the fuel tank. Watching another Zero going down trailing a comet’s tail of fire reminded him how inadequate the self-sealing on those tanks was. And getting hit by a burst might well make his plane break up in midair even if it didn’t burn. Zeros wer
e built light to make them faster and more maneuverable. Everything came with a price, though. If they got shot up, they often paid that price.

  A horrified voice in his earphones: “What do we do, sir? They’re tearing us up!”

  “Protect the strike planes,” Shindo answered, banking frantically to try to protect himself. “They’re the ones that matter. We’re just along for the ride.” Even as he spoke, another Aichi dive bomber caught fire and plummeted, the pilot probably dead.

  Giving the order and having it mean anything were very different. The Americans dove on the Aichis and Nakajimas, flailed them with those heavy machine guns they carried, streaked away before the protecting Zeros could do much, and climbed to deliver another punishing attack.

  Then, quite suddenly, they were gone. They closed up on their own torpedo planes and dive bombers and flew on to the south, towards Akagi and Shokaku. Shindo belatedly realized that his fighters hadn’t had the chance to attack the enemy’s strike aircraft. The combat air patrol above the Japanese carriers would have to defend them.

  And the combat air patrol above the American’s carriers would have to defend them. Shindo’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage smile. No one, from the Indian Ocean to the eastern Pacific here, had yet managed to keep Japanese Navy fliers from striking what they intended to strike. And, he vowed to himself, no one would now.

  But how many carriers did the Yankees have, to have launched so many planes? That was also a belated question. He should have wondered sooner, but all he could do now was shrug. However many there are, we’ll deal with them, that’s all. We have to. He flew on.

  ONAKAGI’S BRIDGE, Commander Minoru Genda got reports from the radiomen monitoring signals from the Japanese aircraft and what they could pick up from the Americans. Quietly, Rear Admiral Tomeo Kaku said, “Gentlemen, it appears likely we will soon be under attack. I rely on our airmen to hold the enemy at arm’s length, and on our crew to fight the ship if for any reason the airmen are not completely successful.”

  “Sir, from everything I’m hearing, this attack will be larger and more severe than the one we faced last year,” Genda warned. “Our intelligence estimates of what the Americans could throw at us seem too low.”

  Kaku shrugged. “Karma, neh? Things are what they are. We can’t change them now. All we can do is our best, and I know we will do that.”

  Was he really as calm as he seemed? If he was, Genda, whose heart pounded beneath his tunic, admired him tremendously. He couldn’t help saying, “I wish we had Zuikaku with us.”

  “So do I.” But Kaku shrugged again. “The Yankees got lucky, and we got . . . not so lucky. That’s karma, too. Here we are, and here they are, and we’ve got to beat them with what we have, not with what we wish we had.”

  The officer in charge of the recently installed radar set was a young, studious lieutenant named Tanekichi Furuta who’d studied engineering at the University of Southern California. “Sir,” he said to Kaku, “we have a signal coming out of the north. Range is about a hundred kilometers and closing.”

  “I understand,” the skipper said. He nodded to Genda. “We have about twenty minutes, Commander. Any last notions that will give us a better chance?”

  “All I can think of, sir, is to tell the fighters above our carriers to hit the enemy strike planes with everything they have and to ignore the U.S. fighters as much as they can,” Genda answered. “They should already know that, though.”

  “Very well.” Kaku nodded again. “We will wait, then, and be ready to maneuver and to shoot down as many enemy planes as possible.”

  “Yes, sir,” Genda said gravely. Akagi carried a dozen 120mm guns and fourteen twin 25mm mounts. She could put a lot of shells in the air. Her escorts could put up even more. How much good would all that firepower do? In the last fight, facing what was plainly a smaller strike force, two of the three Japanese carriers had been hit. Japanese fliers had given better than they got, though, so that battle proved a success. Could they do it again? Would this one?

  “All ahead full,” Admiral Kaku called down to the engine room. In time of need, Akagi could be handled almost like a destroyer. And time of need was coming. The ships ahead of the carrier started shooting. A moment later, so did the carrier herself. Puffs of black smoke appeared in the sky.

  Trailing smoke, an enemy plane—one of the ferocious new fighters everyone was talking about?—cartwheeled into the sea. A great splash, and the aircraft was gone. “Banzai!” someone called. But how many more planes would have to fall before this battle became a success?

  ONE THING JOE CROSETTI HADN’T TRAINED for was antiaircraft fire. There were obvious reasons why not. If such training got too realistic, he might have had to practice bailing out . . . if he could.

  As the attack force neared the Japanese fleet, shell bursts appeared in the sky ahead of him and then all around him. When one shell burst not nearly far enough below him, it was like driving a car over a nasty pothole you hadn’t seen—he bounced sharply down and then sharply up again, so that his teeth clicked together. Only after he tasted blood in his mouth did he realize he’d bitten his tongue.

  A few seconds later, he got another pothole bump, and something clanged into his fuselage. “Jesus!” he yipped, anxiously scanning all the dials on the instrument panel at once. Nothing seemed wrong or out of place. He still had fuel, oil, hydraulics. . . . That clang scared him out of ten years’ growth just the same.

  Only one thing to do—take out his moment of panic on the Japs. The little yellow slant-eyed sons of bitches thought they owned the world. They thought they had the right to own the world, and to take whatever pieces of it they fancied. Joe was here, literally, to show them they were wrong.

  Here they came. The U.S. Hellcats had ripped into the Japanese strike force. Now it was the Japs’ turn to try to knock down as many Dauntlesses and Avengers as they could before the dive bombers and torpedo planes struck at their ships.

  Nobody could say the guys who flew those Zeros weren’t game. Nobody could say the bastards didn’t know their business, either. They understood just what they had to do, and they aimed to do it. If Wildcats and Hellcats got in their way, they fought them. Otherwise, they went for the planes that mattered more.

  “Hit ’em, boys!” The squadron leader’s voice rasped in Joe’s earphones. “The best defense is a good offense. This is what we came for.”

  Joe’s element leader needed no more encouragement than that. “Come on, Crosetti,” he called. “Let’s go hunting.”

  “Roger,” Joe answered, and stuck with the other Hellcat when it zoomed out ahead of the American dive bombers and torpedo planes, as if to tell the Japs they’d have to go through the fighters to get where they wanted to go.

  The Japanese fighters flew in what Joe thought of as a gaggle—not nearly such a rigid formation as the Americans used. It put him in mind of boxing against a southpaw: you weren’t sure what was coming next. They looked as if they ought to be easy to pick off one at a time. If they were so damn easy, though, how come they’d given American pilots two successive sets of lumps around Hawaii, to say nothing of the black eye in the Philippines?

  “Oh, shit!” That was the voice of Joe’s element leader, and panic filled it. Joe saw why, too. A Zero had put a cannon shell into one of his wing tanks. Self-sealing was all very well, but nothing would have stopped that leak or that fire. “I’m going down!” he wailed, and he did, spinning wildly. Joe hoped to see a chute open, but there was nothing, nothing at all—just a Hellcat falling toward the sea.

  An instant later, an Avenger blew up. That wasn’t gasoline catching on fire; that was the torpedo slung under the aircraft blowing up. A Jap fighter must have made a lucky shot.

  Joe looked around frantically for someone to latch on to. He felt naked and alone up there, the way anybody suddenly bereft of his comrade would have. For the time being, he had nobody to keep an eye out for him.

  And then, suddenly, somebody was flying alongs
ide of him. The other American pilot waved, as if to say he’d lost his leader and was looking for somebody to link up with. By the way the fellow flew, he was content to stay a wingman. That wasn’t how Joe wanted to become an element leader, but one of the fastest lessons he got in combat was that nobody gave a damn about what he wanted.

  Some of the Avengers had already started heading down toward the Pacific for their torpedo runs. They weren’t the hopelessly slow, hopelessly clumsy Devastators that had preceded them, but they weren’t any real match for Zeros, either. Several Japanese fighters dove after them.

  When Joe saw that, he laughed a very nasty laugh. The Zero that could outdive a Hellcat hadn’t been born yet. He pointed, then shoved his stick forward. His fighter’s nose dropped. As he dove after the Japs, his new wingman stuck like glue.

  He got on a Jap’s tail and thumbed the firing button. The Zero caught fire. It went straight down into the ocean. Yelling like a red Indian, he went after another one. This Jap must have spotted him at the last second, because the fellow did a flick roll and squirted away like a wet watermelon seed shot out between your fingers. One second he was there; the next, gone.

  “Son of a bitch!” Joe said: frustration mixed with reluctant respect. The Zero really was as maneuverable as people said. Joe sure wouldn’t have tried that getaway in a Hellcat, but it worked like a charm. Still, in evading him, the Jap had to break off his attack on the Avengers, so Joe figured he’d done his job.

  And his altimeter was unwinding like a son of a bitch. He leveled off at under two thousand feet, then pulled the stick back and climbed. If he’d had any Japs on his tail, he would have left them behind as if they’d nailed their shoes to the floor.

  As he gained altitude, he got a look at the Japanese ships not far ahead. He’d spent more than a year studying silhouettes and photos and models from every angle under the sun—and he still had a devil of a time telling destroyers from cruisers, cruisers from battleships. Even the carrier was hard to spot, and he was damned if he knew for sure which one she was.